Under deal, R.I. to become ‘national leader’ on disabled worker rights

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Justice Department has reached a settlement agreement with the state of Rhode Island resolving violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and improving career opportunities for approximately 3,250 Rhode Islanders with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The 10-year agreement, which will help ensure that people with disabilities have adequate opportunity to pursue careers in the general community, is the nation’s first statewide settlement asserting the rights of disabled students and workers to receive state-funded employment and daytime services in the public community rather than in segregated, sheltered workshops and facility-based programs.

“Today’s agreement will make Rhode Island a national leader in the movement to bring people with disabilities out of segregated work settings and into typical jobs in the community at competitive pay,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. “As Rhode Island implements the agreement over the next 10 years, it will make a dramatic difference in the lives of people with disabilities, businesses and communities across the state.”

Samuels congratulated state officials for signing the agreement, and said the Justice Department expects Rhode Island will become a model for the nation with respect to integrated employment for people with disabilities.

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Under the agreement, Rhode Island has agreed to provide:

  • Supported employment placements that are individual, typical jobs in the community, that pay at least minimum wage, and that offer employment for the maximum number of hours consistent with the person’s abilities and preferences, amounting to an average of at least 20 hours per week across the target population.
  • Supports for integrated non-work activities for times when people are not at work including mainstream educational, leisure or volunteer activities that use the same community centers, libraries, recreational, sports and educational facilities that are available to everyone.
  • Transition services for students with I/DD, to start at age 14, and to include internships, job site visits and mentoring, enabling students to leave school prepared for jobs in the community at competitive wages.
  • Significant funding sustained over a 10-year period that redirects funds currently used to support services in segregated settings to those that incentivize services in integrated settings.

In addition, Walgreen Co. and the U.S. Business Leadership Network coalition of Fortune 500 companies will co-host a regional business summit in Rhode Island in June 2014 to explore strengthening partnerships between the state and the business community to find competitive, integrated jobs for Rhode Islanders with disabilities.

The agreement stems from a U.S. Justice Department investigation into Rhode Island’s day activity service for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities that began in January 2013. The Justice Department discovered disabled workers in Rhode Island employed in positions in which they had little or no contact with persons without disabilities, and at which they earned an average wage of $2.21 per hour.

One such worker was a young man named Pedro, a native Spanish speaker with intellectual disabilities who attended the Birch Vocational Center in Providence. According to a Justice Department blog entry, Pedro and other disabled students spent their school days in an in-school “sheltered workshop,” segregated from students without disabilities, where they assembled and packaged items such as jewelry and pin-back buttons for between 50 cents and $2 an hour.

The Justice Department’s 2013 investigation of Rhode Island found that the school-based workshop, rather than offering education and services to help students transition into regular jobs, served as a pipeline to a similar segregated workshop for adults. When Pedro went to work at the adult workshop after graduating from high school at the age of 21, he was paid 48 cents an hour.

In June 2013, the Justice Department entered an interim settlement agreement with the state of Rhode Island and the city of Providence concerning the Providence workshop where Pedro worked and the school-based program associated with it. Under the interim agreement, the state and city provided employment services to help workers at the workshop and students at the school move into integrated, competitive-wage jobs, and the Providence Public School District closed the school-based workshop so students with disabilities could focus on education and career preparation.

With help from federal and state services, Pedro joined a culinary arts training program and began working in the kitchen at Gregg’s Restaurant, where he earned a competitive wage and in December was named Employee of the Month.

In announcing the broader, statewide settlement with the state of Rhode Island on Tuesday, the Justice Department said an estimated 2,000 Rhode Islanders with disabilities like Pedro who are currently employed in segregated programs will have opportunities to work in competitive-wage jobs, and as many as 1,250 students with disabilities will receive services to help them transition into the workforce over the next 10 years.

“The filing of today’s consent decree is a critically important event in Rhode Island history,” said U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island Peter F. Neronha. “It ushers in a new day of opportunity – opportunity for Rhode Island residents with intellectual or developmental disabilities to live, work and spend their recreational time alongside their fellow Rhode Islanders. It is an opportunity for this state to move forward; to recognize, finally, that we are better, stronger, when all of us – all of us – are interwoven in the fabric that is Rhode Island.”

Approximately 450,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the United States work in segregated sheltered workshops or in segregated day programs, the Justice Department said. The settlement with the state of Rhode Island is the first of its kind in the U.S. and advances the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Olmstead v. L.C., which requires persons with disabilities to be served in the most integrated setting appropriate.

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